Historically, telecommunications have involved the transmission of voice and fax signals over a network dedicated to telecommunications, such as the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) or a Private Branch Exchange (PBX). Similarly, data communications between computers have historically been transmitted on a dedicated data network, such as a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN). Currently, telecommunications and data transmissions are being merged into an integrated communication network using technologies such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Since many LANs and WANs transmit computer data using Internet Protocol (IP), VoIP uses this existing technology to transmit voice and fax signals by converting these signals into digital data and encapsulating the data for transmission over an IP network. However, the integration of telecommunications and data transmissions is ongoing, and many features and functionality that were available to users of traditional telecommunications networks have not been made available to users of VoIP and similar technologies.
Traditional communication networks often support multipoint conferences between a number of participants using different communication devices. A multipoint control unit (MCU) is used to couple the devices, which allows users from distributed geographic locations to participate in the conference. Each MCU includes a finite amount of MCU resources to accommodate one or more multipoint conferences, at a given point in time. The conference may be audio only (e.g., teleconference), or videoconferencing/broadcasting may be included. A single MCU may be used to accommodate thousands of participants, in a multipoint conference.